


Full Fathoms Deep

by Sixthlight



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Boats and Ships, Female Friendship, Gen, Horror, Missing Scene, Optimism, Science, cameo from James Copley, write what you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 05:09:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26820082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sixthlight/pseuds/Sixthlight
Summary: It started on the midnight to eight shift, sometime before three, the witching hour even by ship standards.
Relationships: Quynh | Noriko & Original Character
Comments: 81
Kudos: 377





	Full Fathoms Deep

It started on the midnight-to-eight shift.

It was sometime before three, the witching hour even by ship standards, and they had been monitoring the water sampling rosette and its attached Conductivity, Temperature, and Depth sensors as it descended, watching the measurements on the screens. Gary had attached a microphone at the last minute, “just in case there’s some whales around.” All that was coming through was the sound of the CTD rosette moving through the water, and a faint whine that might be the winch vibrating through the cable.

“Three o’clock and all’s well,” Vicky said, stretching her arms. Saying it helped keep her awake; the first few days of these shifts were always the worst, when your body hadn’t got used to getting up at ten pm yet. Still, shift work was how it went on ships, and eight-hour shifts, even when you got rostered on midnight-to-eight, were much better than twelve-hour ones, or the god-awful split shifts the JASON crew ran, four hours on and eight off. As a marine technician she did a bit of everything – lab work, dive monitoring, and sample processing – so there was something to do on every shift.

She’d barely finished the thought when the sound came; a dull pounding, like someone beating on a door from the other side of the house.

Gary frowned at her. “Are you kicking something?”

“No?”

There it was again; muffled but distinct, steady, rhythmic thuds like someone trying to break down a drywall. She twisted to look behind her, trying to find the source of it.

“Is that…coming through the microphone?” Vicky asked. The hair was standing up on her arms and she couldn’t even say why.

“I don’t think –” Gary said, clicking through screens to get to the controller. “No. Yes. What?”

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“What the hell,” Vicky said softly, half to herself. She checked the depth; the rosette was at fifteen hundred metres, and bottom was about sixteen hundred here. They’d be pulling up in fifty.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“Uh…” Gary scratched his head. “Is there anybody working around here? Cable maintenance or something?”

“We’d have had to clear out. I can call the bridge and ask….”

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“Cthulhu,” Gary said. “Definitely Cthulhu trying to break free.”

“Cthulhu’s whole deal is being asleep,” Vicky said, licking her lips nervously, “literally on the other side of the planet. South Pacific, not North Atlantic.”

_Thudthudthudthudthud_ , more frantic this time. Frantic was not a word Vicky wanted to associate with mysterious underwater noises.

“Sixteen hundred,” said Gary. “Dave and the other water column scientists wanted a bottom water sample, right?”

“Triggering number fifteen bottle,” Vicky said, clicking the checkbox that would make sampling bottle fifteen on the rosette, a kilometre and a half below them, open and fill with seawater. “And…on our way back up. Are you recording this?”

“Yep. Let’s play it for Adithi when she wakes up. Part of her Masters’ thesis was on underwater noise pollution.”

Thud. Thud. Thud.

When you kept hearing it, it lost some of its eerie power. It was every – five minutes? Eight? As they ascended, Vicky kept an eye on the clock. It sounded one last time at two hundred metres, and then stopped – either that or, Vicky thought, they got out of range.

“Four o’clock,” Gary said. “I’m going to go check what Susan wants us to do for the next one. Want a coffee?”

“Yeah,” Vicky said. “Please.”

*

“No idea,” Adithi said when they played the recording back to her, just after breakfast. Even in the dry lab on the main deck, with sunlight pouring through the portholes, it still made the hairs on the back of Vicky’s neck rise. “My best guess would be cable installation or mining or…something…but there aren’t any other ships that close, unless the conditions were just right for the noise to travel a really long way.”

“Huh,” said Gary. “Call it a mystery, then.”

Adithi caught Vicky’s eye. “You don’t look happy with that.”

“It creeped me out,” Vicky said. “That’s all.”

“It might be from a long way away,” Adithi said, comfortingly, twisting her long, curly ponytail around her hand. “It probably is just humans doing something dumb on the sea floor. An oil rig, or…sound travels for a really long way underwater.”

“God, I hope so,” said Vicky, and yawned. “Right; I’m gonna hit the gym for a bit before bed.”

“We’ll be on the bottom with the ROV by the time you get up,” said Adithi. “You’ll get all the fun bits.”

“True,” Vicky agreed. Voyages with remotely operated vehicles – robots on strings, she had always described them to her family, if you could call a two-kilometre-long set of electrical and wire cables a “string” – were always fun, because their cameras were so good. You got a fantastic view of everything on the bottom of the ocean. Unfortunately, most of it was mud.

Vicky spent an hour on the treadmill before she shut the curtains on her bunk and tried to get some sleep. They’d been out at sea for a week, so she’d established a good routine, even if the night shifts were still tough. She’d been doing this for a decade now, through her Masters’ and after once she’d got the technician job. It was a lot less exciting at thirty-two than at had been at twenty-two.

Her roommate was on the day shift, eight until four, so she could turn the main lights out, at least. Sleep didn’t come easy. Her cabin was right on the waterline, and the slosh of the waves against the hull kept turning into the thudding from the recording. She was only sharing a cabin because the ones closest to the bow had been left empty due to the noise from the dynamic positioning thrusters. Personally, she wasn’t sure it would be that much worse than the noise mid-ship. But leaving them empty had been the Chief Scientist’s call. They were a little under-crewed on this voyage, eighteen science staff total instead of the maximum twenty-five; eight scientists, three technicians, and seven students, who all made her feel old even though they were mostly only five or six years younger than her. And fifteen ship’s crew, of course.

Slap, slap, _thud_ , went the waves on the hull. _Thudthudthudthudthud._

Screw Gary and his microphone, anyway, she thought, and fell into uneasy dreams of octopus-faced men hammering on the ship, as she raced from porthole to porthole, boarding them up.

*

She woke up, still bleary-eyed, just in time for the evening meal at five pm. Gary liked to stay up long enough for lunch at noon and get up right before their midnight to eight shift, so she ate with the graduate students, who didn’t need her to carry on a cheerful conversation among themselves.

After dinner she wandered out to the shipping container bolted to the fantail deck at the rear of the ship. The deck ran the whole width of the ship and a good eight metres of the length, lending the vessel a curiously unbalanced air, with the main bulk of the ship, above the waterline, shifted towards the bow. It was empty of fixed equipment (though crowded now with all the gear necessary for the ROV) and only two metres above the waterline. At the stern was the huge A-frame that the ROV cable ran through, now in its lowered position leaning out over the water to the rear of the ship, like the open boot of a car, if the boot was much less wide than the width of the vehicle, and had only a top and edges.

The control room for the ROV travelled with it, in a shipping container that the ROV team called ‘the van’. She opened the heavy door and entered the dark, loud space, cold because of the cooling for all the computers, recording the precious data.

Vicky would have to help with samples once they were back on deck, but for now she could stand in the back and watch the show, such as it was. They were in a pretty dull patch of the North Atlantic that consisted mostly of mud. On the other hand, mud was what they were here to get – the slow record of the changing world above – so that was handy.

“Anything good?” she asked Ivan, one of the ROV engineers.

“If you like mud,” he said. “Transiting to the next site now. There was a pretty neat shark on the way down.”

“Still hanging out for a vampire squid,” said Vicky. “There was one on my last cruise, but I only saw the footage afterwards – what’s that?”

Something had appeared in the far-left corner of the camera, lit up in the ROV’s spotlights. Looming out of the mud and barely visible over one of the retracted arms, it looked almost like a promontory of rock. Through the camera of the ROV, there was something soft about it; something almost organic. It looked like it belonged at first, but the longer the spotlight lingered, the more unnatural it seemed.

Then it shuddered. “Is it _moving_?” said François, the other ROV tech.

“I’ll put a pin in the map,” said Ivan. “Maybe we can come back. Still a lot of sampling to do on this dive.”

The ROV camera angled around as they moved slowly past. The rock – or whatever it was – shivered again, visibly, then was still. The guys were both looking down at their control panels and didn’t react. Maybe it was just her eyes playing tricks on her, Vicky tried to think, but the hairs on the back of her neck were still standing up and her back was cold with prickling sweat.

She licked her lips. “Hey, uh…call me when you do.”

*

It wasn’t a rock.

It had, once, been iron. Now it bloomed with rust, great delicate swaths of it, obscuring the original shape of the thing.

“What the fuck?” Gary said. He was controlling the science cameras, now they were late into his and Vicky’s shift. François and Ivan were gone, and instead Tom and Amelie were driving the ROV.

“That looks like the time we were at that hydrothermal vent site. Iron?”

“No hydrothermal vents around here,” Vicky pointed out. “Not until you get to the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Maybe it’s a piece of container, or something? It reminds me of the Titanic footage.”

The ROV was hovering about two metres above the seafloor, its lights casting harsh shadows across the not-rock.

“Grab a piece and stick it in one of the milk crates,” said Susan, the chief scientist, who’d come in to take a look as well. “One of the biologists might have fun with it.”

“I think it’ll fall to pieces if we touch it with the manipulator,” said the engineer who was flying the ROV.

“Do a fly-around first, get some high-res footage,” said Susan, and her word was law for something like this. They did a circuit, kicking up sediment from the thrusters.

“It’s kind of…coffin-shaped,” Vicky observed. “Don’t you think?” She’d been keeping an eye on it, this time, but it hadn’t moved. Yet.

“I told you, Cthulhu.” Gary turned to grin at her.

Susan snorted. “I don’t think so. Let’s get this and come up.”

The two-clawed manipulator arm reached out, slower than Vicky internally expected, like they always were. The moment it touched the blooming rust, clouds of it rose up into the water, blocking all the cameras.

“Ah, fuck,” said Tom. “We’re not going to get anything if it’s like this. I could try the shovel…”

“It’s not that important,” said Susan.

“Shit!” exclaimed Amelie. “Something just – wait – no, I think we’re good.”

“What?” at least five people asked at once; the van had filled up without Vicky noticing.

“One of the cameras took a knock…never mind, no harm done,” he said. As the water cleared slowly, they saw that the whole upper surface of the…item…had fallen in, revealing a hollow. The inside wasn’t quite as rusted as the outer; if you squinted, Vicky thought, the clearing in the rust could almost be the outline of a body. God, she was letting this get to her.

“Shit,” Gary said, turning to Vicky. “I think it _was_ a coffin. Or a box.”

“A box seems more likely,” Susan said dryly. “No, this is no good. We can go over the footage later – it’ll make a nice interlude in the cruise report. Let’s come up. We’ve got real samples to process.”

“Might be something stuck…probably won’t last,” said Tom, easing the manipulator arm back in. The ROV began to rise away from the seafloor. Clouds of rust still hovered in the water; a small bright spot in a plain of mud, quickly lost in the gloom of the deep ocean.

“That’s funny,” said Amelie, after a couple of minutes. “Coming up slow; let’s give it a bit more power on the winch.”

“Let’s make sure –” Tom said, and they fell into technical discussion of tolerances. 

“Cthulhu,” Gary said again. Vicky threw a screwed-up chocolate bar wrapper at him.

*

There was nothing but a rust stain left on the left-hand manipulator arm when the ROV swung back onto the deck, near midnight. One of the microbiologists scraped some of it hopefully into some 1.5 ml tubes. “I’ll freeze it; might be fun to see if there’s anything except _Mariprofundus_ and _Gallionella_ in there.”

“I bet it was a piece of container,” said Vicky. “Or something like that.”

She had started preserving the mud samples for porewater chemistry when a splashing noise started coming from starboard; she turned towards it, and saw nothing except the ocean and the night, rendered dim by the bright lights on deck. The wind was picking up. Must have been a petrel taking off.

“Reckon we’ll turn around before the weather picks up?” she asked Gary. “Forecast isn’t great.”

“Depends how twitchy the ROV guys get. You ever hear the story about how the first ROPOS got lost?”

“Yeah, who hasn’t? Ugh, I hate bad weather downtime.”

More splashing and a dull _thwack_ ; Vicky looked sharply to starboard again. Still nothing. A very _stupid_ petrel, maybe. They did land on deck and get stuck sometimes, because they could only take off from the water.

“Movie night, though,” said Gary. He wasn’t reacting. It was like Vicky was the only one who could hear the noises. She hated that, irrationally. “I love movie night.” 

They bickered amiably about what sort of movie to suggest to the others, Vicky firmly vetoing Quentin Tarantino and Gary holding out for _The Thing_ because he’d done a winter at McMurdo once and was that sort of person. Sample processing took longer than usual, and by the time the ROV was ready to go again, the wind was really up, and the dive was postponed. It was close enough to breakfast that Vicky went to the library and poked aimlessly through the DVD collection until she could head for the mess.

Gary, who had got there before her, frowned at her when she entered. “How’d you get here so fast? Duck through the engine room? You know the crew hate that.”

“What?” Vicky shook her head; it was too late _and_ too early. “I was just down the corridor in the library.”

“No you weren’t,” he said. “I saw you, on the cabin deck.”

It was a perfectly normal thing to say and profoundly creepy all at once. “But you _can’t_ have! I was processing samples, and then I was in the library.”

“I saw you,” he insisted. “I know what you look like. And my eyesight is fine.”

“You didn’t, because I _wasn’t there_ ,” said Vicky, searching her memory. Had she popped back to her cabin for a moment? Was it the end of the shift, the lack of sleep?

The idea of her doppelganger lurking on the cabin deck was disturbing in a way she couldn’t rationalise. It was just Gary, sleepy. That was all. It wasn’t _real_. She’d been up here.

“Well…” he hemmed and hawed. “It’s just, you’re the only, you know…”

Vicky knew what he meant but didn’t feel like giving him the satisfaction; it wasn’t like she hadn’t _noticed_ she was the one of the only two Asians on board, and Adithi was the only other one; she was four inches shorter than Vicky and a dozen shades darker, and she had an undercut, not long hair like Vicky. “About half the science team is women on this voyage.”

“Right, right.” He frowned. “You were only wearing a towel, too. That was the strange…” He must have noticed how high her eyebrows went. “I don’t mean – look, forget it. Hey, we’re going to watch _The Day After Tomorrow_ ; one of the students hasn’t seen it and this is a climate science voyage, we can’t have that. God, they’re getting so young.”

“Fine, fine, that’s fine. Breakfast,” Vicky said, firmly, and went to get it, and a cup of coffee even though she was going to regret that when she tried to turn in.

*

She elected to forego the gym this time, opting instead to lying in her bunk and watching something on her laptop. There was a pronounced sideways roll to their movement by the time she was done with breakfast and headed to her cabin, the absolute worst sort that slammed you sideways into walls as the floor shifted under your feet. Thank God she’d taken her seasickness meds at the start of her shift.

She was halfway down the corridor when a particularly nasty wave hit, the ship rolling to port and cracking open one of the cabin doors. It was one of the unoccupied ones, closest to the bow.

Vicky sighed and stumbled towards it; in this weather, the door was probably going to keep creaking until someone shut it. Then the ship lurched sideways again, and she skidded, swearing and bruising her elbow as she caught herself on the wall.

There was water all over the floor; the kind of thing she’d expect on the main deck but not down here. Then, as she steadied herself and looked around, saw that it trailed down all the way to the stern, drying to a fine sheen of salt. For a moment, her mouth dried. Something had come in here. Something was –

She pinched her own arm. ‘Something’, what was she thinking. _Someone_. Someone must have just stomped through here in their deck gear, dripping as they went. What a complete wanker.

They must have.

The door was half-open but resisted her pull when she reached out to it. The cabin inside was dark and empty; Vicky could see, in the light from the door, that there was nothing in there except the furniture, the unused linens piled on the lower bunk. She tugged harder. The door still didn’t move, and then slammed shut at once, combining with the ship’s movement to catapult Vicky back across the corridor and into the other wall. _Two_ bruised elbows, now; that was great.

She waited a long moment, listening for – she didn’t know what. There was only the hum of the fluorescent lights.

*

By the time she’d grabbed a mop and a Wet Floor sign from the laundry, and dealt with the floor, she was too tired for TV; she just crashed, and slept without dreams. 

“Oh, good, you’re up,” Inge said when Vicky’s phone alarm went off and she pulled back her bunk curtains; it was after four, so Inge was off shift, and the cabin and bathroom lights were on. “This is going to sound quite silly. Have you seen my towel?”

“It was in the bathroom yesterday.” Vicky yawned, rubbing her eyes.

“That’s what I thought! But it is not _anywhere_.” Inge made a noise of exasperation. “Never mind – I will get another one from the laundry storage.”

Vicky put on the minimum clothing required to appear in the mess without causing a stir, which basically meant her pyjamas but with a jumper on top, and went in search of coffee before dinner. The ship was still heaving its way through a two metre – hmm, no, she thought as her coffee slopped, three metre – swell, and they weren’t even doing CTDs, Adithi told her.

“Dmitri and Susan and the Captain are having a meeting,” she said. Dmitri was the ROV team lead. “Trying to decide what we do instead. There’s no question of an extra day, I heard, because the ship’s due in dry dock after this. So it’s a question of what we can still do, if we lose another day to weather. We might not get the full sampling set done.”

“I have a two-week holiday in Malta booked after this,” Vicky said. “So finishing on time suits me. Bit of a bugger for some of the students, though.”

Adithi made a face. “Well, that’s fieldwork. Did you hear we’re doing a movie night?”

Vicky finished chatting with Adithi and then drank her coffee faster than was really advisable – it was fresh and hot – but the cooks hated it if you stood around in the mess just before dinner service. No need to check in on anything else, with the ROV on deck and ops halted. It’d be a quiet shift; she headed back down to the residential corridor again, trying to squeeze in a shower before dinner.

And saw that the door on the cabin nearest the bow was swinging open again.

The latch must be defective, Vicky thought. Maybe she did something to it when she slammed it shut. Maybe the rocking had made the loosened the lock. Maybe she could go take a one quick look and then call up to the bridge and let them know, so they could get it fixed.

She reached in and turned the light on, and stepped over the raised lintel.

Something dug into her jumper – fingers, a hand – and Vicky felt floor of the cabin slam into her back as the room titled on around the door slamming shut with a dull thunk. Someone on top of her, pressing something sharp at her throat. She drew breath to scream and a hand was pressed over her mouth.

Her head hurt from hitting the floor, and as her vision stopped spinning, Vicky got the vaguest impression of long dark hair and the flash of metal. She tried to heave herself upright with the next roll of the ship and felt it almost work – and then a knee dug into her side in a way that was so painful she would have shrieked if her mouth hadn’t been covered, and her head was banged against the floor again, harder. Her eyes blurred with tears.

The person hissed something that Vicky didn’t understand, or was even able to recognise the language of. Then they said something in what sounded something like – classical Mandarin, maybe? Like she’d heard on historical Chinese dramas. But she certainly couldn’t understand it. 

The person went through three or four other languages, their frown deepening with each one, before the woman – Vicky could see now that it was a woman, or at least someone with breasts – said, in English, “Silence.”

Vicky nodded, and made up her mind to scream as soon as the woman took her hand away from her mouth.

“Silence,” the woman said again, as if she could read her mind, and whatever the sharp thing was dug into Vicky’s throat; she could feel something warm running down her neck. Oh God.

The woman looked…like her, or at least more like her than anybody else on this ship; an East Asian woman, and not very young. She was older than Vicky, probably, but not middle-aged; her hair was very long and had bits of seaweed in it. She was naked except for the blue-and-white-striped towel that Vicky, with an edge of hysteria, recognised as the one Inge had been using. It was knotted expertly around her, like a sarong. There was a fine sheen on her skin that crackled as she moved, like a rime of salt. Vicky could taste salt on her lips, where the woman was covering her mouth with her hand. She was colder than she should be, too, and skinny in the way of someone who hadn’t eaten for far, far too long. Her knees dug into Vicky’s sides.

She was impossible and yet. Here she was.

The woman lifted her hand away, very slowly. Vicky licked her lips, and tasted the sea, and didn’t scream.

“You,” she said. “You came from the coffin.”

The woman blinked, like she hadn’t expected that.

“The, the iron…the iron box. On the sea floor,” Vicky whispered. It was the stupidest thing she’d ever said, including the time she was six she’d told her older sister to go ahead and try jumping out of that tree, it would be fine. This was much stupider. There was no way a human being could survive for two _minutes_ at the depth they’d been working at, much less however long it might take for iron to transform almost entirely to rust. There was no way.

“Aye,” said the woman. “I did. What is this vessel?”

*

She let Vicky up after ten minutes. At least Vicky thought it was about ten minutes; it might have been less, or it might have been a lot longer. It wasn’t like she could have checked her watch. The thing she’d jabbed into Vicky’s throat proved to be a screwdriver, one of the long flat-headed ones Vicky recognised as belonging to the ROV crew’s toolset. She must have grabbed it off the deck.

They weren’t normally…sharp. Vicky felt at her throat; there was blood, but it had crusted. She swallowed.

The woman spoke like – Vicky didn’t know what to compare it to. A little bit like she was doing Shakespeare, and a little bit like an American, but mostly not. She wanted to know what year it was – she looked blank-faced at ‘Common Era’, but knew Anno Domini. She wanted to know the name of the ship, and what it was doing, and where they were, and how long they had been at sea, and why it was so _loud_ down here. Every time Vicky opened her mouth to ask a question of her own, she interrupted; and she was, despite no longer pinning Vicky to the floor, between her and the door.

When Vicky had managed to explain that it really was two thousand and twenty years after the birth of Christ, if you believed in that sort of thing, which Vicky didn’t on two counts (only one of them being having gone to an Anglican school) the woman went quiet for a long moment that stretched out, and out. Vicky saw her opportunity. “What’s your _name_?”

The woman looked at her, and still didn’t say anything. Finally she sighed and wrapped an arm around her knees, drawing them up against her body. All at once she looked less like a sea witch and more…younger. More lost. “Quỳnh.”

“Quỳnh,” Vicky said, carefully. “I’m Vicky. Vicky Cho.”

Quỳnh – so yes, Vietnamese, or probably, Vicky thought – wrinkled her nose, like that didn’t make a lot of sense.

“It’s short for Victoria. I’m from Manchester. So’s my mum. Dad’s from Malaysia. Well really my grandparents are, he was two when they – but – you know.” Vicky had the strong sense that Quỳnh did not, in fact, know, if she really had been in an iron box at the bottom of the sea, what the fuck, what the _fuck_ , her mind was skipping over that. But she didn’t know what else to say.

She licked her lips, and tried again. “Are you…did you…how are you…if you really were… _how_?”

Quỳnh threw back her head and laughed. It was hoarse, and not all that much like she thought Vicky had said something funny. “I have no answers. I just am.”

“Right,” Vicky said. She looked at Quỳnh, at the lines of her bones clear on her face, and the salt still crusted on her skin, and drew a deep breath. “Have you had a shower?”

It took them another five minutes to establish what a shower was, and that Quỳnh _definitely_ had not.

“Right.” One thing at a time. “What if…I went and got you some food? And some clothes? While you had one?”

*

That turned out not to be a good idea, because Quỳnh observed with curiosity as Vicky showed her how taps worked, but the minute the water hit her skin she flinched back.

“You’re all salty,” Vicky said, encouragingly.

“You must remain,” Quỳnh said, tight-lipped, and Vicky thought about water on your skin, all over, the dark bottom of the ocean. It was hard to remember it was dark when you only ever saw it through the cameras of an ROV or a camera sled, which carried their own light.

“Okay,” she said. Quỳnh looked at her blankly. “Aye. Yes.”

They got the seaweed out of her hair and the salt off her skin. The bathroom got hopelessly wet, because of the swell and because having Vicky in there meant that the shower curtain wasn’t really doing its job; they had to sweep up the water into the drain afterwards. Quỳnh really was skin and bone. Vicky still didn’t know if she really believed – but the woman had been in the sea, certainly, and she was starved, and afraid, and also dangerous, and the only way Vicky knew how to handle any of this was one step at a time.

“Food,” she said. “Yes? I’m going to bring you food. And clothes, and – I’ll be back.”

The minute she stepped out of the cabin reality came crashing back in. She was soaked, and probably hallucinating; maybe she’d fallen and hit her head in the empty cabin. Maybe night shifts had screwed up her sleep and she was sleepwalking, and Gary _had_ seen her the other day. Or maybe – but she was soaked. Her watch said it had only been forty minutes since she’d left the mess.

One step at a time. She went back to her own cabin, dried off, changed. Went up to the mess. It was half-full, people with not much to do because of the weather, having a hot drink and playing cards. Vicky grabbed a handful of snacks as surreptitiously as possible and ducked out. The noise and the sight of the heaving gray sea made her feel stupid. A woman in an iron box – what was she _thinking_?

She looked down at her hands. There was a red-brown fleck caught in the skin between her thumb and her index finger, on her left hand. Iron. It had washed out of Quỳnh’s hair, along with the seaweed and at least one small crab.

Vicky bit her lip and went to the dry lab the biologists were using. Nobody was in there. She purloined a fifteen-ml tube and put the fragment of iron in it. Then she labelled it carefully with her name and the date and stuck it in her pocket.

*

“No,” Quỳnh said firmly, when Vicky suggested that she take her to the sick bay. “Nobody else.”

“The second mate’s got medical training,” Vicky said. “Uh, I mean, he’s a doctor. He can help you.”

“No doctors,” said Quỳnh. “No men.”

“Do you mean men, like not women, or men like…people?”

Quỳnh frowned at her for a full half-minute before saying “Men,” and making several very filthy gestures that got her point across emphatically.

“Ah, right,” Vicky said. “No men.” She paused. “Did men…put you in that box?”

“Men of the church.” Quỳnh’s face had gone set. She was wearing Vicky’s spare track bottoms and a _RV Sonne_ t-shirt. Vicky had brought her a yoghurt, and some dry crackers; the kind of thing she might eat if she was seasick. Maybe that was what you’d need if you hadn’t eaten for…a while. Quỳnh had nibbled delicately at one of the crackers, then taken a deep breath, sipped at the water bottle Vicky had given her, and pushed the rest of the food aside. She knew what it was like to eat after nothing, it seemed.

“Which church?”

Quỳnh shrugged. “The church. In England.” She pronounced it strangely. “You…are from England.”

“Yes.”

“Do they still hang witches?”

“What? No,” Vicky said. “Not for hundreds and hundreds…” she trailed off. “Hundreds and hundreds of years.”

Quỳnh was clutching the bottle so tightly it was starting to leak. Vicky took it off her, carefully.

“Hundreds,” she repeated, like it was a word she had never heard before.

“I need to go and –” Vicky started to say, but Quỳnh was shaking her head.

“I…do not go again. Please.” She glanced up at the light. “If it becomes dark again…”

“Oh! I can show you. The switch is just here, see –”

The way Quỳnh shrieked when Vicky turned the light off – and on again, very quickly – was unearthly. She threw herself at Vicky, pinning her to the door. For a second her hand was at Vicky’s throat, thumb digging in, and she was afraid; then it fell away, and she could feel Quỳnh trembling.

Vicky gulped, and put an arm around the other woman. “It’s going to stay on. It will stay on. I promise.”

Quỳnh clutched her arms and wept quietly into her t-shirt. Vicky felt sick.

“I’m sorry,” she said into her hair; the other woman was taller than she was. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, it’s okay.”

God, she hoped she wasn’t going mad.

*

Once the panic attack wore off Quỳnh seemed to pull on a mask; confident, dangerous, aware of everything about the room. It half-worked because Vicky remembered with extreme terror the feeling of nearly having her throat slit with a screwdriver, a screwdriver that she didn’t currently know the location of but was certain was somewhere on Quỳnh’s person.

It half didn’t work because her own t-shirt was still a bit soggy with Quỳnh’s tears, and also because most of Quỳnh’s focus was on the rest of the food that Vicky had brought down. It was just very hard to be properly afraid of a woman wearing one of Vicky’s ratty cruise t-shirts and eating yoghurt with a teaspoon.

Vicky hated to leave her alone, but if she wasn’t mad, and she didn’t think she was, then…she needed help. And Quỳnh had set down a very particular condition. Plus, if she went now, she wouldn’t quite miss dinner.

As a compromise, she pulled out her phone and put on some music. Quỳnh jerked back, startled.

“What is that?”

“It stores music, and makes it again whenever I want it,” Vicky said, frantically contemplating the implications behind the word ‘phone’. “I thought…I thought you might like something to listen to.”

“That is music?” Quỳnh said, very dubiously. Vicky had picked one of the few classical tracks she had downloaded; well, Baroque, technically.

“Yes?”

Quỳnh wrinkled her nose, not pausing in her consumption of yoghurt. “I know I’m not…I know this isn’t a dream, now. I could not imagine anything that strange.”

“Cool,” Vicky said brightly. Quỳnh gave her an absolutely blank look. Language: they were going to have to work on it.

*

“This better be good,” Adithi said as Vicky led her down the stern ladder. “The movie’s starting soon.”

“It’s not good but it is important.”

“Okay,” Adithi said slowly, in the tones of someone humouring a child, or possibly a drunk friend. “What is it – _what_?”

She’d stepped into the cabin, and seen Quỳnh, who was hunched over Vicky’s phone, squinting at it and poking it with her finger. It was silent.

“I made the music stop,” said Quỳnh. “It will not come back. Choose something better.” She sounded indifferent, authoritative. But her eyes were on Adithi, and Vicky had caught the glint of metal below the table.

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Vicky. “This is Adithi. She’s a friend. I told you I was going to bring a friend.”

“We have a _stowaway?”_ Adithi threw up her hands. “What the _hell_ , Vicky?”

“She’s not a stowaway,” Vicky said.

“Stowaway?” Quỳnh asked.

“Somebody who hides on a ship and isn’t supposed to be there.”

“I am hiding, and I am not supposed to be here.”

“Someone who hides…when the ship is in port.”

“Well of course she must have – where else would she have come from?” Adithi put her hands on her hips.

Quỳnh looked at her, for a long moment. Adithi’s hands dropped; she sensed the same thing Vicky did, which was that she was being assessed by someone who could and would hurt her.

“I came from the sea,” she said, finally.

Adithi laughed, nervously. “The sea.”

“She did,” Vicky said. “She had seaweed in her hair, and…she did. I thought maybe I was…imagining things. But now you’re here.”

“Don’t worry,” said Quỳnh. “If anybody has lost their senses, it is me, and I am still…where I was.”

“Oh my god, oh my _god_ ,” said Adithi. “You’re not going to try and tell me she was in that…coffin.”

Quỳnh flinched, visibly, at the word. For whatever reason, that was what convinced Adithi, or maybe it just struck her speechless; she went ashy-grey. “Oh my _god._ ”

Quỳnh laughed herself, high and brittle. “Maybe I’m still there. I don’t know, anymore.”

“You’re not,” Adithi told her, immediately fierce. “You – Vicky, why haven’t you _told_ anybody?”

“Well, I thought I might be going mad. And she asked me not to.”

“Maybe I’m going mad.” Adithi sat down on the chair; Quỳnh had the bench seat. “And we’re going to do…what? We’re at sea for at least another six days.”

“Yes,” Vicky said. “That’s why I need your help.”

*

Quỳnh asked if Adithi’s family was from “Hindustan” and just nodded when Adithi said she was from London; Vicky supposed that a Vietnamese woman who had apparently been locked into an iron coffin in England during a medieval witch-hunt couldn’t be that surprised by modern immigration.

Or _would_ it be medieval? She really wasn’t sure. Everything she knew about witch-hunts came from foggy childhood memories of _Sabrina the Teenage Witch_ and that time she’d been on a NOAA ship over Hallowe’en and the American scientists had insisted on watching a movie with one of the women from _Sex and the City_ as a singing witch in very bad make-up. Somehow, she doubted that had had much historical accuracy about it.

She mentioned this. Adithi wrinkled her nose and said, “We’re missing the movie for this, you know.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“There’s popcorn.”

“Oh, well.”

“Did you cut yourself?” Adithi reached out, pointing to her throat. “You’re bleeding.”

Vicky felt it; the small cut had broken open. “It’s nothing…it’s not important.”

“I had a blade on her,” Quỳnh said, not at all helpfully. “She was very brave.”

Adithi gave Quỳnh a look of round-eyed horror; Vicky, annoyingly, felt herself blushing. “It doesn’t matter, really.”

“A blade?” Adithi leaned backwards in her chair.

“I won’t hurt you.” Quỳnh waved a hand. “I promise, if you like.”

“Well, that’s fine then,” Adithi said tartly. “Vicky, six days. What are we going to do?”

Vicky took a deep breath. “Nobody’s staying in this cabin. I thought she could stay here, and we could bring her food, and then…we’ll worry about port when we get in. I just can’t do it all myself, because of our shifts.”

“You want me to stay in this room,” Quỳnh said, flatly. “For six days.”

“You said no men. That’s the easiest way.”

Vicky was already beginning to pick up on Quỳnh’s expressions. This one was unhappy. “I…do not think I can do that.”

“Look, I’m not saying I believe she was really in a box at the bottom of the ocean,” said Adithi, “but even prisoners in solitary get to go for a walk now and again.”

“I don’t know how to make it – wait,” Vicky said, remembering her conversation in the mess, with the first mate. “Maybe I do.”

*

The next four days were the strangest of Vicky’s life. She did her work, and ate her meals, and even made time for the gym; and in between, she sat in a windowless cabin and answered questions about the world, and what this ‘fish and chips’ Vicky was eating was, and why the peas she gave Quỳnh were so soft, and why all the music was too loud and didn’t have enough words. Quỳnh was still nibbling at crackers, mostly, eyeing Vicky’s food with mixed wistfulness and loathing. She slept a lot, too, and sometimes woke up screaming. But the salt was gone, and Vicky thought her cheeks might be starting – very slowly – to fill out. Dressed in Vicky’s clothes, lying on the floor reading a book aloud to herself, she looked so normal – so much like a student or colleague – that Vicky started to think maybe Adithi was right; there had to be another explanation.

Taking her outside was, in the end, very simple; late one night, or more like very early one morning, they dressed Quỳnh in Vicky’s hoodie, with the hood up, and Adithi took her out around onto the bow deck. You could see it from the bridge but as long as Quỳnh faced forward, nobody was going to notice the difference. There was nowhere really good to sit, but you could see the sky and the sea. And the sky, and the sea. Vicky had told Gary she was running data analysis and hidden in the computer lab her whole shift – they were transiting to the last site, so ops were off.

“Nobody’s going to notice anyway,” said Adithi. “People see what they expect to see. Especially when they’ve been at sea for three weeks.”

They stayed out there for a long time, much longer than Vicky had expected, only reappearing after sunrise; she’d already gone back to Quỳnh’s cabin to wait for them. Quỳnh looked windburnt and alive, like someone had lit a flame inside her.

“It is so strange,” she said, “that you cannot see the stars.”

“Running lights,” said Vicky. “It makes it too bright to see the stars. Every time I come out, I hope it’ll be different, and it never is – which is good, because if they went out it would mean we’d lost power, and that’s bad. Did you guys stay for the sunrise?”

“It was a good one,” said Adithi.

“They are all good ones,” said Quỳnh. “They mean you are alive.”

Adithi yawned. “I might be alive but I’m also asleep. Ugh. I’m going to nap through breakfast.”

Vicky stood up. “I’ll bring you some back, Quỳnh. Any requests?”

“No more crackers,” Quỳnh said, very firmly. “More fruit.”

“Fruit, all right,” said Vicky. She hesitated, before leaving the cabin. “Quỳnh. I have to ask…we’ll be in port in forty-eight hours. Back on land. Where….what do you want to do then?”

“I will find my family,” Quỳnh said, immediately, supremely confident.

“But…” The words died on Vicky’s lips, because they sounded so stupid. But they must be dead; if you were…were you really…I’m not sure I believe it anymore.

Quỳnh studied her, considering.

“They are alive,” she said. “Do not ask how I know. I think you would not like the answer. But I know.”

“I love answers! I’m a scientist.”

Quỳnh arched her eyebrows and said, “I have seen them in my dreams.”

Vicky had absolutely nothing to say to that; Quỳnh laughed. “See. You do not like it.”

“I’m…learning new things,” said Vicky. “Okay. I guess we’ll find your family.”

Quỳnh gave her a gentle push on the shoulder. “Go break your fast. And remember; fruit. I do not mind what.”

*

After she’d eaten, and snuck Quỳnh her own food, Vicky went back to the computer lab and dug into the file system. It took her a bit of back and forth until she found the images of the sarcophagus; she’d forgotten the exact time they’d first encountered it. But there it was, whole on the ocean floor, delicate pillows of rust obscuring an iron box. There was the manipulator arm touching it, there was the rising cloud of rust, and there – Vicky’s breath caught in her throat. There was something in the cloud that hadn’t caught her eyes, or anybody’s, when they’d watched it in real-time. A long swirl of dark hair; the shadow of an arm.

She went back and forward. There wasn’t anything more. Just the settling cloud, and the remnants of the box, and the patch of less-rusted iron that could have lain under a body.

Vicky thought about it again, the crushing pressure, the darkness, the idea of drowning, and she barely made it to the head before she threw up.

Once she’d rinsed out her mouth, she pulled the tube out of her pocket, the one with the iron fragment. She carried it everywhere with her, like a talisman; she was obscurely certain it would vanish if she put it down. Still there, still real.

She got back to the computer lab to find Gary bending over the monitor she’d been using.

“Still worried about Cthulhu?” he said, turning as she entered. “It’s pretty weird, you know what – it almost looks like there’s a person, when you run the footage back.” He laughed, inviting her to share the joke.

“Octopus tentacles and bat wings, huh?” Vicky managed, her heart pounding.

“More like the Blair Witch.”

Vicky almost, _almost_ , said “She’s not a witch,” but she swallowed the words down just in time, and tasted bile.

“I was trying to work out what it was,” she said instead. “It’s just so weird. But you know, I think we were right, it’s part of a container or something. God, the junk that ends up on the ocean floor, it’s a bloody disgrace. Remember when we saw that mug from the _Atlantis_ , a couple of voyages ago?”

“Forget the mugs; it’s all the microplastic that keeps me up at night,” said Gary, and yawned. “Right, bed for me.”

He wandered away. Vicky sat in front of the computer for an hour, dragging the video in and out of the trash. She should. She shouldn’t. It was irreplaceable scientific data. It might put Quỳnh in danger; people would want to know why and how. It was a figment of her imagination.

She couldn’t do it, in the end. It was too big, too much. Nobody else would see what she’d seen; Gary had looked right at it and said _almost looks like_.

She clutched the tube in her pocket and made herself go to bed.

*

“You’ve done it again,” the first mate said to Vicky at dinner, which was her breakfast. “Two places at once. I really don’t know how you manage it.”

“What do you mean?” Vicky said, but this time she knew what he meant; it was just that he didn’t know. Couldn’t know. Could he?

“Could swear I saw you on the bow just now,” he said. “But you’re fresh out of the shower.”

“I shower quick,” Vicky said, her heart thudding in her ears, laughing in the way you did when you needed men to believe you weren’t bothered. “Went out for a walk as soon as I woke up.”

“Best way to do it out here!” he agreed, and then Gary sat down and asked Vicky a question about demob, and who was going to get the samples to cold storage, and the conversation moved on.

She flew downstairs as soon as she could, bursting into Quỳnh’s cabin. Quỳnh was leaning against the wall, legs crossed, looking at a book Adithi had brought from the ship’s library; she was moving her lips and muttering as she read, as she did. It was Shakespeare, Vicky noticed, distracted. 

“Someone saw you!” she said. “Outside.”

“They will think I am you,” said Quỳnh. She tilted her head, eyes flickering between Vicky and the door. “Am I your prisoner?”

“No,” Vicky said immediately. “We just don’t want – we’ll be in port tomorrow, you know. Tomorrow.”

“Then no harm is done,” Quỳnh said, smiling, and Vicky knew she had lost an argument and didn’t know how.

“Hey,” she said. “I thought you might – you might like to try these.” She held out an open packet of Maltesers. “Just one, I think your stomach can handle that.” After all, if she’d really been at the bottom of the ocean…she’d have missed out on chocolate.

Quỳnh snatched the whole packet, typically, but selected and ate just one. Her eyes went very round. Her hand clenched on the packet.

“I’m keeping these,” she said.

“Just – one at a time,” Vicky reminded her.

*

The next morning, the day they were due back into Southampton, Adithi pulled Vicky aside after breakfast, and said “We have to tell someone.”

“Tell them what?”

“There’s customs!” Adithi threw up her hands. “This afternoon! And you _know_ what it’s like now. They’ll think she’s a refugee, they’ll think she’s trying to sneak in. We have to tell someone.”

“They’ll _take her away_ ,” Vicky said, grasping Adithi’s arm. “They’ll lock her up. You know that. And deport her to – to –”

“I thought you said she has family.”

“She didn’t say where.”

“Look, I understand,” Adithi said. “She’s – she’s dangerous, and you’ve kept her calm, and that’s great, but we have to -”

“She’s not dangerous!”

“She _tried to cut your throat_.”

“Not like that,” Vicky said, which was the weakest possible argument in response to Adithi’s not unreasonable point. “I don’t know. I like her.”

They were interrupted by the floor leaning, leaning, like the ship was about to capsize, a thought that sent a wave of horror through Vicky; she realised, as they grabbed at walls and it slowly came right, that they had just made a very, very sharp turn.

“What the fuck?”

“Man overboard,” Vicky said, remembering a long-ago drill, and bolting for the nearest ladder. As she made the main deck, she could hear yelling.

“Are they yelling for _you_?” panted Adithi, on her heels.

“I don’t know!”

They burst out onto the fantail; people were leaning and pointing. Then one – Gary – turned and saw them. He clapped his hands to his mouth, as if he were exaggeratedly parodying shock, but there was nothing parodic about his eyes.

“What’s going on?” Vicky demanded, moving towards him.

“Guys,” said Gary, grabbing the arm of the person next to him – Emily, one of the ROV techs. “Guys!”

One by one, everybody turned. They all started and stared like they’d seen a ghost.

“What’s going _on_?” Vicky said again.

“You were in the sea,” Gary said, laughing. It wasn’t a normal sort of laugh.

“I was down below. Now I’m here.”

“I saw you go overboard!”

“I’m here. I’m _here_.” Vicky yelped as Gary gave her the most unexpected hug of her life.

“Sorry! Sorry.” He backed away. “Then what….”

“I have no idea what’s happening,” Vicky said, mouth dry, certain she absolutely did.

*

Quỳnh was gone from the cabin. She had left a screwdriver, now sharpened to a fine point, the three books she’d borrowed, Vicky’s tablet, still softly playing the _Hamilton_ soundtrack, and the mostly-empty packet of Maltesers, like a gift.

“Shit,” said Adithi. “Were we hallucinating?”

“Did you hallucinate making a shiv?” Vicky waved the screwdriver at her. “And my _Sonne_ t-shirt is still gone. I liked that t-shirt.”

“Do you think she could make it to land, from here?”

“I don’t know.” Vicky felt sick. What would it take, to jump back in the sea, if you’d really been – she couldn’t imagine. “I think we have to hope so.”

“I wonder if that family she’s supposed to have are all as mad as her.” Adithi folded her arms. “I wonder what the _fuck_ this all was.”

Vicky took her to the computer lab, while everybody else was busy with demob, and showed her the footage.

“Oh, great,” Adithi said. “We’re not mad; it’s just magic. Unsolvable, inexplicable magic.”

“I don’t know what it is,” said Vicky. “I’m just glad I’m not the only one who knows it.”

Adithi sighed, loud and exaggerated, and patted Vicky on the shoulder, which meant she was glad too.

They came into port; they cleared customs; they got to stay that night in a hotel, and drink themselves silly at a pub. Vicky left early. There was always land-sickness when you got back after a few weeks at sea, but it was particularly bad that night, the room swooping around her for a full hour after she lay down. Vicky breathed through it, and tried not to think of lying in the depths of the sea.

*

Four months later, a man came to see her at work. He was Black, and British, and wore a good suit; Vicky guessed something private, maybe even something in the City, but he didn’t say who he worked for, just introduced himself as Copley.

“Yes?” Vicky said. “Is this about –”

“It’s about your recent guest,” he said. “On your April voyage. She said she may have left some items with you. I was hoping to get them back.”

Vicky’s heart clenched in her chest. “Is she alright?”

She hadn’t meant to say it, but now she couldn’t think of anything else that mattered. “I thought she was mad. I thought I was going mad. Is she alright?”

“Yes,” he said. “But as I was saying…”

“There was a screwdriver,” Vicky said. “It wasn’t any good for screws anymore; I chucked it. That was all.”

He examined her face for a long, uncomfortable pause, but it was true; it hadn’t been any use, and Vicky didn’t need a shiv in her day to day life, besides which it was probably against the knife laws. She’d chucked it into one of the big dry lab rubbish bins.

“Does this have anything to do with that video the ROV team lost, that got corrupted?” she said. “If you’re asking about that, I think you know what I mean.”

“I am sorry about the data, but…it was necessary.”

“Let me guess, you’re from the secret society of immortals or whatever,” Vicky joked. He didn’t break. “Look, never mind, I don’t need to know. Actually, I don’t think I want to.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Most people wouldn’t say that.”

“I think,” Vicky said, having had a long time to think about it, “she was alone, and she was afraid, and if she was telling me the truth…I don’t know what to believe, and if she wasn’t, there must have been a reason. She said she had family. I suppose that’s you.”

“Hmmm,” he said. There was a crease on his brow, something about the way he looked down and then up again, that might have said _guilt_ ; Vicky wondered why.

“Tell her hello,” she said. “And that I hope she’s sleeping better. And found some more music she likes.”

He smiled. “You are a quite extraordinary young woman, Dr Cho.”

“I’m thirty-two,” Vicky said tartly. “‘Young woman’ is for students.”

“Yes, I apologise. My perspective on that has been…somewhat skewed, lately. Thank you.”

He didn’t say for what; Vicky didn’t ask.

After he left, Vicky went down to the cafeteria and paid for one of the fancy barista coffees, which she didn’t normally bother with. She took it back to her shared office, opened the cruise report, and read it, drinking her cappuccino. It talked about backup failures, resulting in the loss of a day’s worth of video data from the ROV, and a formation on the sea floor. Probably a piece of container, Susan had written. It emphasized the problems with marine pollution; so far out at sea, and so deep.

Vicky put her hand in her handbag to feel the smooth round shape of the plastic tube with its iron fragment, still there, still real. When she licked her lips, for the first time in months, she didn’t taste salt.

**Author's Note:**

> and that was the Quỳnh Gets Rescued By Marine Researchers fic, folks! 
> 
> HUGE thanks to stardust-rain, beta extraordinaire, who seriously improved the horror elements - not my forte - and reined in my desire to let Quỳnh try all the snack foods on her first day back eating for five hundred years. (But I had to let Quỳnh have _one_ Malteser.) If you like horror and queer Asian people on scientific research expeditions you should check out her podcast [Station to Station.](https://www.procyonpodcastnetwork.com/station-to-station)


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